CPAC: Hackneyed and Hollow

I never know how to set my expectations for the Conservative Political Action Conference, also known as CPAC.

I try to approach it with as much of an open mind as I can muster, understanding that I am at odds, fundamentally, with many conservative principles and conservatives’ views about the role, size and scope of government, but also realizing that apart from a debate setting, this may be the best place to take the temperature of, and hear from, the broadest range of conservative leaders.

I still think, perhaps naïvely so, that people can be ideologically opposed but intellectually engaged, that a good idea makes the best bridge.

So I do my best to follow the speeches — from afar (thank you, live streaming!) — and wait to hear something that jolts my consciousness or challenges my sense of things.

But once again this year, I was disappointed.

There remains in the Republican Party, as evidenced by the speakers at this event, a breathtaking narrowness of vision and deficit of creative thought.

The confab, for the most part, felt to me like a revelry of contrarians. Rather than presenting the party as one with a plan, many of the speakers seemed determined to cement it as the party of resistance and opposition.

Where were the grand conservative thinkers? Where was the philosophical heft? Where was the vision of a future not built on a transporting to the past?

It was largely absent. In its place was too much rhetoric about defending, defeating, defunding, deauthorizing. There was so much anti-Obama and anti-Hillary obsessing that the “pro” alternatives — to the extent that a case could be made — were obscured.

Furthermore, it was hard to skip over all the missteps.

Scott Walker, the leader in a new and oh-so-early Quinnipiac University poll of likely Iowa Republican caucus participants, compared union protesters in Wisconsin to the savage members of the Islamic State.

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Rick Perry still couldn’t get his facts straight. He said the president “says that ISIS is a religious movement. Again, he’s simply wrong.” No, sir, you are wrong. The president has taken pains to make the opposite argument, and has taken some shots for that. Perry also said that “ISIS represents the worst threat to freedom since communism.” Really? Calm down, cowboy.

Chris Christie hung much of his question and answer presentation on bemoaning his coverage in the media, skirting the obvious fact that previous media fawning is a large part of the reason he rose to national prominence. Live by the pen; die by the pen.

Jeb Bush did his best before a somewhat hostile crowd — there were boos and hisses and some folks walked out (some in costume, of course) and reportedly shouted, “No more Bushes.” It must be noted here that CPAC is a particular kind of crowd: not exactly like the Republican electorate, and not at all like the national electorate as a whole. (Rand Paul has won the last three CPAC straw polls.)

But Bush seemed awkward and uncomfortable, trying to set up camp on both sides of the ravine on some issues like immigration and the Common Core.

This is where the Republican Party continues to falter. The cavalcade of contra nothingness at CPAC barreled forward with more speakers who lacked vision and brio.

I guess one could make the argument that if the Republican pool of candidates is wide but shallow, that’s good for Democrats. Indeed, it is.

Republicans have done exceedingly well in the recent midterms — in part because of anti-Obama Tea Party animus in 2010 and the fact that voter turnout for the 2014 midterms was the lowest of any election cycle since World War II. But presidential election years are a different story: They are national elections with a different electoral profile and greater participation.

And nationally, the Republican brand remains tarnished.

A Pew Research Center report released last week found that “majorities say the Democratic Party is open and tolerant, cares about the middle class and is not ‘too extreme.’ By contrast, most Americans see the G.O.P. lacking in tolerance and empathy for the middle class, and half view it as too extreme.”

This, of course, does not mean Democrats will have it easy in 2016 or thereafter. In fact, history tells us that politics swing like a pendulum.

But if this is the quality of candidates and discourse of the Republican side when that pendulum swings back, then that’s tragic. If the bulk of your message is about what you are against rather than what you are for, if it’s about dragging the country back rather than leading it forward, then we’ll all suffer.